IN CONVERSATION WITH JOHN MAY
Joseph Scherer:
Do you think there’s a relationship between the development of technologies that permit new ways of
seeing nature and the consistent emergence of ways
of claiming attachment to those forms?

in statistical machines like the digital computer, we
began to see the emergence of this new conception
of the environment. And that’s what we’re working
with today: a condition in which our perception of
the world has be thoroughly reoriented around a
particular set of technical arrangements and their
associated concepts. When we are presented with
scientific and bureaucratic depictions of the ‘natural
environment’ today, we are confronted with a condition in which “the natural” is essentially defined as
that which can be represented as information (or
‘data’) in the form of discrete electronic charges.
Only by acknowledging that can we begin to work
through what it might mean for architects to engage
‘more ecological’ practices.

John May:
Absolutely. Although I would want to modify your
question somewhat, first by divorcing it from the language of “development” and “permission.” Let’s say
instead that the relationship is between technical
methods of representation and the particular conceptions of nature associated with those methods.
For example, we can point to a specific shift that
took place, just prior to and during World War II, in
which the concept of environment was restructured,
in substantial and very particular ways, through the
tethering of that concept to the technical parameters
of electronic visualization. If you look closely at those
technical parameters – at their history and design
– it becomes clear that this restructuring had the
much more subtle effect of reorienting our understanding of the environment around a kind of
statistical reasoning implicit in the design of electronic instrumentation.

Scherer:
It sounds like that’s kind of a feedback loop then:
there is a conceptual framework for understanding
nature, but then the tools are invented in support
of that (or they produce that concept). I’m trying to
untangle the relationships there – not to say that
there needs to be a completely hierarchical understanding of cause and effect here – but I wonder if
you’ve seen consistent relationships between these
phenomena in your research of this history.

In other words, through the details of that instrumentation, the conceptual and discursive foundations of “the environment” – its very essence as
a scientific object – was reformulated around the
limitations and assumptions of probabilistic reasoning. As that view became increasingly concretized

May:
Whether or not the instruments we’re using are
documenting “the world as it exists” – whatever that
would mean – or whether they are realizing (let’s say
“making-ontological”) a particular interpretation of
the world – this is a question that runs through the

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heart of modernity. In my view, it becomes especially
important after 1945, a year which we can use as a
kind of rough pivot point from progressive to reflexive
modernity. From that point onward – to use Beck’s
logic – modernization began to concern itself far
more with the management of internally-produced
risks: radioactivity, pollution, toxicity, etc.

GIS technology document existing conditions or does
it generate real conditions? It does both. That is, it
postulates an abstract model – a statistical model –
and then it poses modes of intervention in order to
realize that model. So it belongs to what Sloterdijk
has called the “ongoing explication of space” that
defines modern managerial techniques. At this
point we are so adrift among these instruments
that, to my mind, the question is neither one of
causality, nor one of technological determinism: it’s
a matter of struggling to understand the resonances

The relationship between representation and
intervention is one that has to be interrogated with
a certain intensity, because although it involves a
seemingly timeless recursivity, the specific details – historical, technical, political, etcetera – of
that relationship are under constant revision. We
are constantly finding new ways of opening up the
world, of making it available for adjustment and
restructuring. Once upon a time it was possible to
frame those adjustments entirely within the language
of progress, but it would require tremendous naiveté
to do so today.
There’s no doubt that the statistical conception of
the environment is an effective way of seeing the
world – it contains tremendous managerial capacities; exponential gains in control and efficiency have
been realized through the signalization of environment. But it may have much more to do with revealing potentials than discovering essences, and in any
case we’re clearly paying a very steep price for our
newly found prowess. Some of the easiest examples
are found in the use of geographic information
systems (GIS), which is a tremendously powerful
instrument for the spatial management of data. Does

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Fall/Winter 2011

IN CONVERSATION WITH JOHN MAY
Joseph Scherer:
In relation to this idea that architecture or architectural theory is failing in some way, I’m thinking
about projects that were radical in the 60s and
70s… Archigram and stuff like that. There was a
desire to actually have those things become real
projects. There’s a time when Banham actually
expects that he’s going to open the door and there’ll
be a circus out there, and everyone will be free. That
faith seems like a very unique moment when theory
and design were bridged, yet it was still unsuccessful. So: if architecture is doing the best it can, and if
theory is failing, and together they didn’t really get
anywhere, doesn’t that suggest a complete inability
to change the situation?

that shape daily practice might count. We should
also remember that theory constitutes a form of representation, and in this historical moment it might
be more in need of attention than other forms, which
I realize is not a very satisfying answer.
You can avoid becoming despondent by keeping a
longer timescale in mind. It’s not your job to solve
the numerous crises of habitation we face collectively. It’s simply your job to begin to sort through
the reality of our technological lives, with the hope
that a patient description might teach us how to not
repeat our mistakes, or at least help teach us how to
live – not merely survive – amidst the decaying fabric of modernity. In that sense, the notion that there
is a ‘solution’ to our current predicament reveals
an already instrumentalized conception of thought,
which imagines life first and foremost as a set of
problems in need of planning and management: a
truly negative conception of life. Instead, what has to
take place is a much longer historical-philosophical
project that dives beneath that psychology. The analogy that I usually draw is with feudalism. Feudalism was not ‘solved.’ It was slowly dissolved, over
several hundred years, and ultimately replaced with
an entirely different mode of existence. That process
required the invention of countless concepts like
‘rights’ and ‘democracy,’ which previously had not
existed, and the patient discrediting of other ideas,
‘divine right’ and so forth. Part of the problem right
now is that we aren’t doing any of that. Instead,
what we’re doing is passively receiving representa-

Eileen Witte:
Another question comes to mind when we compare
the current state of architectural theory to that of
the 60’s and 70’s. Archigram and others of that
time were inadvertently critiquing the notion that
architectural representation – in a particular, the
plan – could order a society through planning and
the creation of fixed spaces. Their eccentric use
of representation suggested that the plan, as an
architectural tool, was too deterministic. And so I’m
interested to know if you think that today we need
(or have already developed) reactionary forms of
representation that critique the statistical project.
John May:
I think any project that aims to discover or reveal
something buried within the rote technical processes

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images by: Brantley Highfill

tional regimes from scientific and technological discourses, assuming that those will somehow quickly
get us out of our predicament while still preserving
our precious lifestyles. I don’t see that happening.

to an extent that mechanization never allowed.
Take scripting, for example, which is tremendously
powerful. It’s radically different than older forms of
mechanical representation that generated something
like the Nolli plan.

Scherer:
Okay, take the Nolli Plan of Rome – that’s a fairly
subjective data set, but it allows for the visualization of data in a way that might not otherwise
be immediately comprehensible to the public. Then
today, we’ve got Venturi Scott Brown, and let’s
say that they’re designing in a way that’s related to
that visual framework and that dataset. But we can
imagine that, with other datasets and other tools, we
might have different projects emerging from it.

As architects, we have to understand that our disciplinary subjectivity has radically changed over the
last three decades – especially over the past decade. Nearly all the decisions that we used to make
mechanically are now electronically automated.
That’s not a pejorative statement, and certainly
mechanization contains its own forms of automation.
But electronic automation is predicated on entirely
different control loops, and arguably has more
drastic implications as the proposed scope of intervention expands. As that happens, the automation
of decisions around datasets becomes much more
pertinent. As soon as one begins to speak in the language of landscapes and territories and populations,
one can no longer remain naïve to the basic fact that
we are presently abrogating our agency to automated
processes whose full reality we haven’t bothered to
understand. We are very facile with those processes,
and we possess tremendous technical acumen, but
we don’t understand them. I’ve not yet seen an adequate history of scripting in design, much less one
that manages to reconstitute some plausible theory
of ‘automatic agency.’ That phrase is, in some sense,
historically contradictory. If today it is simply an
empirical fact – which I believe it is – we must find
ways to reinscribe the concept of the subject within
this radically altered technical field.

May:
I think in part what you’re suggesting is that all
datasets are subjective, which is why it becomes so
important to understand the features of statistical
reasoning at work on a particular set of information.
We haven’t discussed it yet, but a significant factor –
alongside the wartime desire for telemetry – behind
the becoming-electronic of environment has been
a drive towards automation. So in a way you can
say, “yes, life became electronic.” But that wasn’t
some sort of natural or geological process. It was
motivated by an intense, one might even say oneiric
obsession with automation. Automation is a dream
buried so deeply in the modern psyche that we can
no longer see its horizon. In any case, certain kinds
of statistical-electrical processes can be automated